


Mind Craft

by oracular_hedgehog



Series: The Dream Life of Toby McClure [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Amnesia, Artificial Intelligence, Boredom, Computer Programming, Cyberpunk, Gen, Ghosts, Loneliness, San Francisco, Starting Over, Transhumanism, consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-10-29 01:29:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20788346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oracular_hedgehog/pseuds/oracular_hedgehog
Summary: Toby McClure was dead. Now he's been uploaded. Life should be amazing, so why is he bored?





	1. Chapter 1

Jason stared at his laptop screen unblinking. Reading even the simplest documentation made him feel like a python trying to swallow a wildebeest. Maybe if he opened his eyes wide enough, he could somehow stuff everything he needed to know about this codebase into his head in one gulp. 

His eyes watered, and he slammed his laptop shut.

“What,” Julie said. It wasn’t a question, and he wasn’t in the mood to humor her by pretending that it was. She huffed, closed her laptop gently, spun her office chair around, and raised an eyebrow at him from across the living room. “Jason.”

“What?” 

He grabbed their mugs and went to the kitchen, ostensibly to pour them both fresh cups of coffee. If he had been honest, he wanted just as much to avoid looking into her eyes.

“If rage was a currency, we’d all be millionaires,” she called to him. 

From Julie’s desk in the living room in front of the window overlooking the courtyard, she had to lean back in her chair to see into the kitchen. He looked up while he poured and could just see her face, shooting him a challenging look.

The apartment was small, though not quite as small as the last one they’d shared together. He couldn’t remember living in that apartment at all, but the building was abandoned after the tech bubble collapsed, and Julie had taken him to see the haunted shell of the place where they’d tried to build a company. It had been tiny, a studio with a bed on every wall. They’d worked on their startup, Specera, from an island of desks in the middle of the room. There was barely enough room for a stove, a tiny fridge, and four piles of dirty laundry, one for each founder. How they’d been able to stand living in such close quarters was incomprehensible to him. 

While there was only technically one bedroom in this new apartment, the living room and kitchen were separate rooms, which made sleeping on the living room couch a little easier to bear. It helped that Julie and her roommate Norman shared a bedroom. Seeing them crammed in together made him feel like less of a failure. After the drama they went through together at NEBO, it was a miracle that they managed to live that way without killing each other. 

“I can feel that something’s eating you,” she said. “I’ve felt it all afternoon.” 

“Sorry.” 

He was angry. He couldn’t deny that, but it gave him hives the way she just knew. He needed to get out. He needed his own place, but there was no way he’d be able to afford it until he got a job. Until that happened, he couldn’t even afford to escape to a coffeeshop, not without asking her for the money, and he was already asking for enough.

“You don’t need to be sorry. Just tell me what’s wrong. Maybe I can help you fix it.”

Jason laughed as he walked back to the living room and handed her a mug. “Fix it? I’m a forty year-old programmer. I haven’t written a line of code in almost twenty years, and I am trying to get a job in San Francisco. I must be out of my mind.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, blowing on her drink even though it was hours old and cold as the water in the San Francisco Bay. “There wasn’t a day you didn’t write code the whole time you were traveling.” 

“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” he asked. “I can’t remember a single thing.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “All you have to do is put the headset on. Your memories are there. Put on the headset, and it’ll be like nothing has happened.” 

He glowered at her and said nothing. She was right, but he hated the way she said it so casually, as if needing a prosthesis for his brain was supposed to be as easy to swallow as needing glasses.

“Maybe I don’t want to remember.”

“Then go to bartending school and forget about it,” she said. “I told you I’d help you out until you got back on your feet. That doesn’t mean you have to become a programmer again.”

“Maybe I should,” he said. “Becoming a bartender would probably be faster, even if I did start wearing the headset.”

She opened her mouth to argue—he know what she was going to say because they’d had this exact argument at least a dozen times—and his phone beeped. 

“Convenient,” she said. 

He took his phone out of his pocket and checked it. It was a message from Toby. 

“Toby always could tell when I was in a crisis,” he said.

Toby was the ghost that lived in the computer under Julie’s TV. Or, he was an AI that believed himself to be Toby. They still weren’t entirely sure. On the advice of Jason’s mentor, Frank, Julie and Jason had decided not to care.

“You’re not in a crisis, Jason Pepperman,” Julie said. “You’re just being stubborn.” 

He pressed the speech-to-text button on his phone, and she rolled her eyes at the beep, turning back to her work.

“What,” Jason said into his phone. A moment later his phone beeped again. “You’re bored already?”


	2. Chapter 2

“Already?” Toby snapped. “I’ve read every long book series I can get my hands on… Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Outlander… I’ve read all the Discworld books. I’ve watched all the movies and TV shows of all the books, and I’ve rewatched Buffy. Twice. I can’t stand watching or reading for one more minute. I need people, Jason.”

“I know. I get it,” Jason said. “I really need to be studying right now, though. Julie and Norman are working, too. Couldn’t you talk to people on Reddit?”

“That’s not a conversation,” Toby said. “That’s just birds tweeting.”

“No,” Jason said. “That’s Twitter.” 

Toby had died in 1999. He had been dead for years when Jason accidentally summoned him into the VR headset he was hacking on. AI or ghost, Toby had missed twenty years of culture. It was hard for him sometimes to keep things straight.

“Have you tried Minecraft?” Jason asked.

“What is it? An 8-bit mining simulator?” Toby asked. “Why would I want to play that?”

“It isn’t 8-bit. It’s just. Um. Blocky,” Jason said.

“Blocky,” Toby said. “That’s a real sell.”

“It’s fun!” Jason argued. “Immersive. Creative. Like Specera with trees instead of space ships. Big world, lots of room to explore.”

Toby leaned back in his chair at stared up at the ceiling. He’d written most of the code that controlled the virtual environment he lived in. Changing things was as simple as editing the code. The first thing he’d done after he moved from the headset into Julie’s computer was code himself a desk and a computer. Computers looked different now. They were smaller, sleeker, but he had made himself a chunky monitor like the one he had at Specera. Even now, there wasn’t much else to his environment. Just a bed and a fridge and a stove and a cast iron skillet. He didn’t need much else, and the minimalism felt cozy and familiar. He looked down at his screen and stared at the Minecraft icon on his desktop. It was literally a piece of dirt. 

He sighed. “I’ll try it.”

“You’ll like it,” Jason said. “I swear.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Is Toby alright?” Julie asked.

“Yeah, he’s fine.” Jason said. “He’s just bored.”

He picked up his laptop and did his best to send out “I have important work to be doing” vibes. It didn’t work. Less than a minute later, Julie was standing over him with a stern look on her face, holding out a headset. 

Part of his mind was in that headset. Seeing it made him feel like he was looking at his own brain splattered against the wall. Nausea flooded his stomach. He closed his eyes and breathed shallowly, willing it away.

It was a stupid mistake. He’d been among the first to get the surgery that allowed him to plug into NEBO’s virtual reality club, Matcha. He was so cocky then, sneering at NEBO’s lack of creativity. They had taken his baby, the game engine behind the massive open world VR game they were making at Specera. They had dreamed of going to the stars, and all NEBO could imagine doing with it was creating another social network. The tech behind Matcha was cool, though. He had to admit it. Even he hadn’t dreamed of being able to have such an immersive experience of his game, so he got the surgery with the intent to hack it, not realizing that the same system that allowed him to imagine him and his friends into any place that he could imagine was also powerful enough to allow him to literally call up the dead if he tweaked things just right.

He’d been so afraid when he’d seen Toby, he’d unplugged without shutting down properly, not only killing—he thought—any chance of seeing Toby again, but ripping all of his memories of Toby from of his mind. The headset was a physical reminder of the fact that for one brutal moment he didn’t even want to remember that his best friend existed, that he was willing to hurt his brain to make sure that his memories of Toby were erased. 

The hard irony was that he was no mind surgeon. He and Toby were so close, tearing Toby from his memory meant tearing almost everything he remembered about Specera and programming he did after the company collapsed from his memory, too. Twenty years of work and memories. Twenty years of memories he could get back all at once if he just plugged that headset into his neck.

“You know how this works, Jason,” Julie said, sitting on the couch next to him. “You plug in, and it’s like putting pieces together. Most of the memories are still in your head. It’s mostly just the connections between them that are missing. Wearing the headset will give them back. It’s not really changing your brain.” 

“And what will happen when my brain starts building on those connections, Julie?” Jason asked. “Right now, I’ve got a case of bad amnesia, but if I start wearing the headset all the time, there’ll be no way of stopping my brain from using it to store new memories. I don’t want to lose my mind if I lose my glasses.” 

“Oh, I hadn’t really thought of that. That’s fair,” Julie said, looking down at the headset in her hands. “You still don’t really remember Toby, do you?”

“Not really,” he said. “I know that we were close. I know things about him—mostly things you’ve told me—but I don’t actually remember anything about when he was alive, no. And I’m afraid to remember.”

“Why?” Julie said. “It wasn’t all bad before he died. I remember.”

“That’s true, but…” Jason hesitated, searching for the words. “Have you ever played back something that happened to you when you were younger, and you see things really differently?”

“Of course, I do. What do you think happened when I was at NEBO?”

After Specera, Julie had been hired as a personal assistant for NEBO’s CEO, but when Matcha failed—in no small part because of Jason’s hacking theatrics—she had been reassigned to investigating the contents of the headset he’d used to call up Toby. It had been her personal hell, reliving the fall of Specera and Toby’s death through Jason’s eyes, but she was grateful for it now. If someone hadn’t gone back to see what Jason had seen, Toby might have been trapped in the headset reliving those nightmare memories of his last days forever. 

“It was a surprise to all of us when Toby died,” Julie said. “At the time, I couldn’t understand it. I went over and over everything I could remember. I couldn’t find anything that might have given me a clue that he was desperate enough to...”

“Jump,” Jason said. “You saw things when you looked back, though, didn’t you? With time and distance, you saw warning signs?” 

“I did,” Julie said, “but Jason, it wasn’t your fault. Founding a startup was Toby’s dream. Then he learned that startup life was actually unbearable for him, and he was incapable of imagining any other way to live.”

“That’s…concerning,” Jason said. 

“Why?”

“Have you seen his place? It looks just like our apartment when we worked at Specera.”


	4. Chapter 4

Toby opened the game, expecting to find his avatar in a dungeon. Instead, his screen filled with sunshine. Distant mountains towered over a crayon green meadow speckled with flowers while cheerful electronic music heralded the rise of a square sun. 

”This can’t be right,” Toby thought. “Am I even playing the right game? 

The menu bar claimed that he was playing Minecraft, but there were no mines anywhere. There was a cave, but it felt wrong to choose to be in such a gloomy place when he could be outside frolicking in the sun. 

He tested the controls, punched a flower and picked it up. The game announced that he had found a dandelion. He climbed a hill and looked out over the grass toward the mountains. He could spend the entire afternoon running through the valley picking flowers. 

He looked over his computer monitor at the empty white walls of his room. There were no windows or doors. Why would there be? His room was his world. The idea that he might make a window to suggest anything beyond it hadn’t even occurred to him when he made the room. 

Maybe, just maybe, there was room for a view. With a few keystrokes, he created a sunny window and returned to the game.

Sunset shone fuschia on the horizon as night fell in the game. Walking toward the glow, he found a patch of white ground that crunched under his feet, and it started to snow. He stopped and watched it fall, mesmerized until he heard footsteps behind him and a long hiss.


	5. Chapter 5

Two hours passed, and Jason heard nothing from Toby. He smiled wickedly and tried to focus, but it was too quiet. Across the room, Julie arranged roughly drawn circles in a geometric pattern on her laptop while listening to a podcast. If he listened hard, Jason could barely hear voices leaking out of the giant headphones that covered her ears. 

At Specera, Toby had been the company DJ. His preference for anthems and power chords fit with the gravity of their quest for glory. 

Outside of parties and sports games, Jason hadn’t listened to Queen since Toby died. He could now. Toby was alive again. He considered putting some music on for a minute but realized it didn’t feel right. 

Toby was alive, and he wasn’t. He was there to talk to whenever Jason wanted—Toby was, by far, the most extroverted person he knew and was always eager to hang out whenever Jason had the social energy—but he wasn’t really there. If Toby had been there, he would have been digging through the same moras of documentation, crabbing about the latest changes to JavaScript, speculating about which companies would be most likely to ignore the years Jason spent as a full-time raver. He would have been there right along with him all along, partying until the sun came up, spending Specera’s exit money. Jason’s temporary retirement would have lasted half as long, but he might have had some actual fun. He wouldn’t have spent most of his afternoons crying while everyone else was at work, curled up in a strange bed in someone’s apartment in Mumbai or Berlin, getting his grief out of his system so he could put on the merry prodigal act when his host came home. 

He could remember only brief snatches from that time when he wasn’t wearing a headset, but even those fragments were enough to put him in a dark mood. 

A message from Toby snapped him out of it. 

“I just spent two hours breaking things and running away from zombies and exploding cats,” Toby said. “Why the hell is this game called Minecraft?”

“They’re creepers, not cats” Jason said, “and you haven’t been breaking things. You’ve been gathering materials.” 

“What am I supposed to do with 200 dandelions?!” Toby demanded, and Jason chuckled. 

“Glad to hear you’re in a better mood,” Julie said, taking off her headphones. “What is it?” 

“Toby and Minecraft,” Jason said. “I’m thinking about making a server. Do you want to join?”

“Nah,” she said, turning back to her work. “If this design isn’t ready to go on tissue boxes by the end of the week, my client is going to be pissed.”

Jason shrugged and opened Minecraft, created a server, and invited Toby to join.

“Punch a tree,” Jason said.

“What?!”

“Just do it,” Jason said. On Jason’s screen, Toby’s avatar waved at a block of leaves, and nothing happened. “No, keep punching it.”

A piece of log flew out of the tree. Both the log and the tree that remained above the space where the log had been hovered in midair.

“It’s… a piece of tree!” Toby said, picking up the log.

“Pretty much everything in the world can be taken apart and turned into something else,” Jason said. He shared his screen with Toby and showed him how to turn the log into boards and the boards into a crafting table. “Take this. Open the recipe book.”

“I can make a compass?!”

“Knock yourself out, buddy.”


	6. Chapter 6

Toby was getting tired, but, in the game, Toby’s avatar was just getting up for the day. There was so much to do. Eggs to gather. Cows to breed. Sugar cane and wheat to harvest. He was building an enchanted library in the basement of his house. One more book and he would have entire wall lined with shelves. With that milestone complete, he decided, he would go to sleep. 

He marched his avatar out of the house, satisfied with the sound of the door slamming behind him as the pressure plate activated. The aesthetic of his homestead was rustic—a log cabin lit by a cheery fire in the fireplace; a barn made of dark oak planks; and a chicken coop protected with iron bars, the closest thing he could find to chicken wire—but this only made him delight more in the automated amenities he’d built into the place. 

Doors opened and closed when he wanted them to. With the flick of a switch, wheat harvested itself and stacked itself neatly in chests in the barn.

There were only two things he hadn’t automated yet: slaughtering animals and harvesting sugar cane. 

He would never even attempt automated slaughtering. In reality, of course, the animals were no more alive than the blocks of granite he mined, but it felt wrong to simulate factory farming, even if it did save him the effort of chasing chickens around the chicken coop. He wouldn’t have even killed animals at all if he had another way to make books and arrows, but both of these items were essential and demanded a sacrifice of chickens and cows.

With sugar cane he had no moral qualms about automation, but sugar cane was tricky. He couldn’t just wipe out an entire row of sugar cane the way he did with wheat. The only automated system that would be useful to him would be one that allowed him to harvest only the second segment of cane and above. He was certain that someone else had already solved the problem, but he refused to allow himself to check. Figuring out a solution for himself was part of the fun. 

In the meantime, he had to harvest each plant one at a time.

His sugar cane farm was down the hill from his house, following the bend in a river. Walking in a straight line from his front door, he jumped down the river bank and landed exactly at the beginning of the line of sugar cane. He had miscalculated the growth of the plants slightly. There was only one block of new growth per plant since the last time he harvested, but that would be enough to get him to his goal. 

He ran through the cane punching madly, watching with satisfaction out of the corner of his eye as the stack of sugar cane in his inventory grew. It reminded him just a little of summer afternoons running through the meadow behind his parents’ house when he was young. The grass towered above his head. Running with his arms out, he blazed a trail like a human machete, creating his own nonsensical crop circles. 

“If only it really was me running through the sugar cane instead of my avatar,” he thought and immediately felt foolish. 

Back up at his workshop, he piled his hoard of sugar cane into the crafting table. He was reaching the limits of his endurance, half playing on auto-pilot, relying on memorized gestures to work around the slowing of his brain the way a jazz pianist uses muscle memory to increase their speed. His memorized gestures betrayed him. Without realizing it, he set the crafting table to make sugar instead of paper. He was going too fast to catch the mistake. With a single click, his entire supply of sugar cane was converted into sugar. There was no going back. He couldn’t undo it, and he would never make enough cakes to justify that much sugar. 

Unless he wandered around looking for a new supply of sugar cane, there was no way he’d be able to make that bookshelf, and he was just too tired. He would just have to wait for the sugar cane to grow back. 

He punched his monitor button and rubbed his eyes. He had no physical body to get tired anymore, but his brain started to feel like crunchy cereal when he spent too many hours in a row awake. The white light of his empty room was blinding and cold, jarringly uncomfortable after hours in the game. He made a few adjustments, first making the light more dim, then more red, before settling on the soft blue light of evening just after sunset. The light didn’t hurt as much, but the changes didn’t really make him feel better about his space, either. 

Too tired to deal with it, he made himself a fuzzy blanket and curled up with it on top of his sheets. Touch-starved, he pulled the blanket over his head, relished the feeling of softness against his cheek, and fell asleep before his tears reached his improvised pillow.


	7. Chapter 7

If Jason had been paying attention, he wouldn’t have been surprised by the ways Toby changed. His transformation would have made sense the way the transformation of an acorn into a mighty oak makes sense: seed, to sprout, to sapling, to giant. Instead, from Jason’s perspective, Toby changed the way trees in Minecraft grow. One minute he was a sapling. In the next, he was towering over the house. 

It had been over a week since Toby exclaimed over the compass and went quiet, but Jason had been so absorbed in his work since then that he didn’t even notice until he mindlessly sent him a meme picture. 

Instead of getting the laughter back that he was expecting, Jason got what was clearly an automated message, “AFK. Minecraft.”

Surprised, he sent it to Julie, “Do you know anything about this?” he asked. 

“Away from keys,” Julie messaged back. They were in the same room, but she didn’t turn around to look at him. “He can’t be AFK and playing Minecraft at the same time, can he?”

“I’m going to see,” Jason said. 

He logged into Minecraft, looked for Toby, and cheated to his location. He found a simple farm like something out of a novel about pioneers. Toby was running toward the river. 

“Hey,” Jason said. “I thought you were AFK.” 

“I am AFK,” Toby said. “I’m not playing Minecraft. I’m in Minecraft.”

Toby’s avatar looked up at Jason, and for one terrifying moment, Jason swore there was someone staring back at him from behind those blocky eyes.

He slammed his laptop shut and messaged his mentor, Frank. “I think Toby’s lost it. He thinks he’s inside Minecraft.”

“It’s about fucking time,” Frank messaged back. 

“What?!”

“How much sense does it make for a man in a computer to be simulating being on a computer to play a video game with the simulated computer? There’s no reason he can’t just run the simulation in his world and step into it. He’s made of code as much as the game is, as far as we know. Are you worried about him? What’s he doing?”

Jason opened his laptop and found Toby running through the sugar cane.

“I’m a mountain man!” Toby cried as the sugar cane exploded around him. “I’m the dad from Little House on the Prairie. I’m Jamie Fucking Fraser!”

Toby wasn’t lying. He was too much of a sentimentalist for voice typing. He couldn’t have typed that on a keyboard and made his character run at the same time unless he was in the game and those words were made by his voice.

“Oh my god, it’s the end of everything,” Jason messaged Frank.

“I’m afraid so,” Frank messaged back, “Unless… You went in there and kept an eye on him.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m made of atoms, Frank.” 

“You are, but I specifically remember you having a very expensive surgery to allow you to use a device that would be a pretty handy translator between Toby’s world and your own. He can’t join you in this world, but you can very well join him in his.” 

Only Frank could manage to communicate the twitching smirk of a mustache through text. 

“Damn it, Frank.”

“If that is your will, oh holy guardian angel, master of the apocalypse.” 

Jason gritted his teeth and reached for the headset.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story and would like to know more about my writing, check out my [writing blog](http://bea-writing-fiction.tumblr.com).


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